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Is it? I seriously doubt it, and writing essays that get skimmed, graded and thrown into trash is a pointless task anyway. People who want to cheat will always

Is it? I seriously doubt it, and writing essays that get skimmed, graded and thrown into trash is a pointless task anyway. People who want to cheat will always find ways to cheat. But if you genuinely want to learn something new then LLMs make it an order of magnitude easier, because they tell you exactly where to start, which resources to consider, giving you completely tailored answers to your problem or project, even if they're still oftentimes wrong. Google being increasingly useless in recent years also didn't help things. I would not be surprised if in 20 years multimodal models are the main way to for most people to learn. There's always a lack of teachers, they're underpaid and forced to deal with an increasing amount of parent bullshit, half of them don't even have a good grasp of the topics they're teaching or just no longer give a fuck. Eventually there simply won't be enough of them and a personalized automated solution will just be better and cheaper. College professors? Probably in 10 years already and both them and the students will be happier for it, the former that can now finally focus on research and the latter for actually having a competent tutor instead of someone who has no aptitude for it but is forced to do it regardless.

corinroyal 2y ago
> writing essays that get skimmed, graded and thrown into trash is a pointless task anyway. Since when is writing essays and getting expert feedback pointless if you want to learn how to write? > There's always a lack of teachers, they're underpaid So rather than prioritizing teaching we should conduct a moonshot project to build a homeschooling technonanny that uses enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard so we can educate our kids without human interaction?
- moffkalast 2y ago
  If you want to learn how to write, you mainly need to read more, and fixing grammar and punctuation is an automated thing nowadays. If you feel like you're getting expert writing feedback from a high school teacher then you won't be writing any novels any time soon anyway. > we should conduct a moonshot project to build a homeschooling technonanny that uses enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard so we can educate our kids without human interaction Actually, unironically yes since you only have to do pretraining once. A model that can then run inference locally on smartphones and is used for many years would amortize its creation cost though the utility it provides in a few years. It wouldn't even have to be AGI tier, just good enough to work with. A single teacher educating 30 people vastly underperforms 1-1 tutoring. It's a "good enough" system and it doesn't work very well for most people, it's just the only thing we have. Hell most of it is just following a fixed script that repeats every year, answering a few questions and grading based on ground truth. A personalized teaching system that knows your interests and skills would be able to motivate and explain far more effectively by adapting the script to you in pace and difficulty. Being available to you 24/7 for questions and having a personality you like would certainly help too. There's this 11 year old video [0] from the ex-teacher CGP Grey that turned out to be pretty prescient and elaborates a bit more on the general idea. All of this could even be done sustainably, running training during peak solar hours, excess wind power and the like, but as long as there's demand it doesn't make sense to leave your expensive and rapidly depreciating GPUs idle. And there's demand because people have this misconceived notion that AGI is somehow winner take all, making it a race where everyone's flailing about like a headless chicken. In reality whoever gets there first will have a short first mover advantage for half a year and then everyone else will replicate their work, and probably an open source version a year and a half later tops. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M
  - corinroyal 2y ago
    This is a perfect example of how AI hype breaks people's brains. It's a Bond villain scheme, not a way to improve public education. People learn best from other people and always have. Computers in the classroom have always been a net negative.

corinroyal 2y ago

> writing essays that get skimmed, graded and thrown into trash is a pointless task anyway. Since when is writing essays and getting expert feedback pointless if you want to learn how to write? > There's always a lack of teachers, they're underpaid So rather than prioritizing teaching we should conduct a moonshot project to build a homeschooling technonanny that uses enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard so we can educate our kids without human interaction?

moffkalast 2y ago
If you want to learn how to write, you mainly need to read more, and fixing grammar and punctuation is an automated thing nowadays. If you feel like you're getting expert writing feedback from a high school teacher then you won't be writing any novels any time soon anyway. > we should conduct a moonshot project to build a homeschooling technonanny that uses enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard so we can educate our kids without human interaction Actually, unironically yes since you only have to do pretraining once. A model that can then run inference locally on smartphones and is used for many years would amortize its creation cost though the utility it provides in a few years. It wouldn't even have to be AGI tier, just good enough to work with. A single teacher educating 30 people vastly underperforms 1-1 tutoring. It's a "good enough" system and it doesn't work very well for most people, it's just the only thing we have. Hell most of it is just following a fixed script that repeats every year, answering a few questions and grading based on ground truth. A personalized teaching system that knows your interests and skills would be able to motivate and explain far more effectively by adapting the script to you in pace and difficulty. Being available to you 24/7 for questions and having a personality you like would certainly help too. There's this 11 year old video [0] from the ex-teacher CGP Grey that turned out to be pretty prescient and elaborates a bit more on the general idea. All of this could even be done sustainably, running training during peak solar hours, excess wind power and the like, but as long as there's demand it doesn't make sense to leave your expensive and rapidly depreciating GPUs idle. And there's demand because people have this misconceived notion that AGI is somehow winner take all, making it a race where everyone's flailing about like a headless chicken. In reality whoever gets there first will have a short first mover advantage for half a year and then everyone else will replicate their work, and probably an open source version a year and a half later tops. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M
- corinroyal 2y ago
  This is a perfect example of how AI hype breaks people's brains. It's a Bond villain scheme, not a way to improve public education. People learn best from other people and always have. Computers in the classroom have always been a net negative.